Related papers: Microlensing optical depth as a function of source…
The mass of the lenses giving rise to Galactic microlensing events can be constrained by measuring the relative lens-source proper motion and lens flux. The flux of the lens can be separated from that of the source, companions to the…
We present preliminary results of the analysis of 5 years of MACHO data on the Galactic bulge microlensing events with clump giants as sources. This class of events allows one to obtain robust conclusions because relatively bright clump…
Zaritsky and Lin have recently suggested that the color magnitude diagram of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) contains evidence of foreground red clump stars. They interpret this as evidence of tidal debris or a dwarf galaxy at a distance…
Because we know little about the Galactic force-field away from the plane, the Galactic mass distribution is very ill-determined. I show that a microlensing survey of galaxies closer than 50 Mpc would enable us to map in three dimensions…
We present microlensing calculations for a Galactic model based on Han & Gould (2003), which is empirically normalised by star counts. We find good agreement between this model and data recently published by the MACHO and OGLE…
We compute the predicted optical depth and duration distribution of microlensing events towards Baade's window in a model composed of a Galactic disk and a bar. The bar model is a self-consistent dynamical model built out of individual…
We present the results from the OGLE-II survey (1996-2000) towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which has the aim of detecting the microlensing phenomena caused by dark matter compact objects in the Galactic Halo (Machos). We use high…
(Abridged version): The optical depth is widely used in Galactic microlensing studies as a means to determine the density of MACHOs, since in theory it depends only upon their spatial distribution and is therefore less model-dependent than…
We generalize to elliptical models the argument of Kuijken (1997), which connects the microlensing optical depth towards the Galactic bulge to the Galactic rotation curve. When applied to the latest value from the MACHO collaboration for…
It is conventional to calculate the probability of microlensing for a cosmologically distant source based on the Press-Gunn approximation that the lensing objects are uniformly and randomly distributed in the intervening space with a…
I review recent results from gravitational microlensing surveys of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The combined microlensing optical depth of the MACHO and EROS-1 surveys is tau_LMC = 2.1{+1.3/-0.8}* 10^{-7} which is substantially larger than…
The color-magnitude diagrams of $\sim 1 \times 10^6$ stars obtained for 19 fields towards the Galactic bulge with the OGLE project reveal a well-defined population of bulge red clump stars. We found that the distributions of the…
We report the detection of 45 candidate microlensing events in fields toward the Galactic bulge. These come from the analysis of 24 fields containing 12.6 million stars observed for 190 days in 1993. Many of these events are of extremely…
At any instant, there are roughly 1000 ongoing microlensing events to sources brighter than 20th magnitude in the Milky Way Galaxy. Large-scale maps of the microlensing optical depth and the mean timescale are constructed for a number of…
The optical depth to microlensing toward M31 due to known stars in the disk of M31 itself is $\tau\sim 2\times 10^{-7}e^{-r/d}$ where $d$ is the disk scale length and $r$ is the distance along the major axis. Thus, there can be significant…
The observed microlensing events towards the LMC do not have yet a coherent explanation. If they are due to Galactic Halo objects, the nature of these objects is puzzling --- half the halo in dark 0.5 Msol objects. On the other hand,…
Measurements of the microlensing optical depth and event rate toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) can be used to probe the distribution and mass function of compact objects in the direction toward that galaxy - in the Milky Way disk,…
Gravitational microlensing surveys target very dense stellar fields in the local group. As a consequence the microlensed source stars are often blended with nearby unresolved stars. The presence of `blending' is a cause of major uncertainty…
I obtain an upper limit for the optical depth to microlensing toward Baade's Window of $3\times 10^{-6}$ by assuming that all of the mass of the Galaxy interior to the Sun (and not in the bulge) is in a disk. The exponential scale height of…
We present analysis of MACHO Alert 95-30, a dramatic gravitational microlensing event towards the Galactic bulge whose peak magnification departs significantly from the standard point-source microlensing model. Alert 95-30 was observed in…